Thursday, October 11, 2007

I love these old mystery schematics where the idiosyncratic drawing style and lack of a readily identifiable energy input system often leave me fairly puzzled as to the true context or viability of the machines. I'm not necessarily sure that a knowledge of Arabic would enlighten us to any great extent.

Although there are a few astrological images, this anonymous manuscript is almost totally devoted to fluid dynamics and mechanics. I can't find any background to the work and suppose it was produced somewhere between the 16th to 19th centuries.

All the images here are cropped details from the source pages at Max Planck Digital Library where the ~300 page manuscript is listed simply as 'Anonym., Ms. or. fol. 3306 ,o. J.' ('or.' being Oriental)

The above images (fairly large in size) have also been uploaded to Wikimedia.

I presume this manuscript copies from earlier scholars, most notably Al-Jazari.

The Al-Jazari wikipedia link is a good place to get a vague understanding about at least a couple of these devices. The 2-D diagrams here are very deceptive: pumps operated by fluid chambers/buoyancy for the mostpart I think.

Thank you for posting this photos,probably this machine is a fluid clock ,that gives hours and the month that the reason behind the astrological schematic. and in many photos there is multi-cut presentation multiple view port of the machine "top view-and side view"